Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and us when you use SailCoach. They are written to be read, not skimmed past. If anything here is unclear, email [email protected] and we will explain it in plain words.

Most of the people who use SailCoach are children, and this document is written in adult legal language. There is a plain-language page about privacy for young sailors at Privacy for Young Sailors. There is no plain-language version of these terms or of the Acceptable Use Policy yet — which is a gap, because the acceptable-use rules are the ones a sailor can lose their account for breaking. We are writing one.

1. Who we are

SailCoach is operated by Innovology Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales and trading as SailCoach. Our website is https://sailcoach.app.

• Registered name: Innovology Ltd
• Company number: 11778435
• Registered office: 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, England, N1 7GU
• Place of registration: England and Wales

We are a small organisation. There is no support desk behind a switchboard — messages to the addresses in these terms are read by the people who build and run the platform.

Our Information Commissioner's Office registration number is not published here yet. It is the one company detail still outstanding, and it will appear here once it is confirmed. If you need it before then, ask at [email protected].

2. What SailCoach is — and what it is not

SailCoach is a record-keeping and analysis tool for sailing. It lets sailors, coaches, parents and clubs record training sessions, write and share notes, set goals, keep track of race results, and look at analysis derived from published race data and GPS tracking.

SailCoach is not a safety system, and must never be used as one.

• We do not supervise sailing. We are not present on the water, we do not know the conditions, and nothing the platform displays is a judgement about whether it is safe to sail.
• Decisions about whether to launch, what to wear, what to sail, how many safety boats are needed and when to come ashore belong to the people at the venue — the sailor, the parent, the coach, the race officer and the club — applying their own training, the RYA's guidance and their club's own safety procedures.
• Features that look like safety features are administrative records, not controls. A safety briefing recorded on SailCoach is a record that a briefing happened. A coach-to-sailor ratio check is arithmetic on the numbers a coach typed in. A medical note is a note somebody wrote; it is not a medical record, it is not verified, and it may be out of date or incomplete. Never rely on SailCoach to tell you about a sailor's medical needs — ask the sailor and their parent.
• We do not verify anyone's identity, age, qualifications or background checks. Coaching qualifications and DBS certificates recorded on SailCoach are entered by the coach and, where a club uses that feature, marked as verified by that club. We do not check them ourselves and we do not vouch for them. Two other places on a coach's profile are typed by the coach and checked by nobody at all — a free-text "certifications" box, and the qualifications list on a public coach page — and neither carries a marker telling you so. If it matters to you whether a coach is qualified and vetted, ask the club, and ask to see the certificate.
• SailCoach is not a substitute for qualified instruction. Drills, analysis and suggestions in the product are information for a coach and a sailor to weigh up, not instructions to follow.

In an emergency on the water, call 999 and ask for the Coastguard.

3. Words we use in these terms

4. Who may use SailCoach

If you are 18 or over, you may create your own account.

If you are under 18, you may use SailCoach only if a parent knows about it, agrees to it and has read and agreed to these terms. When you sign up we ask for a parent or guardian's email address. That is a term of this agreement: you must give a real address for a real adult who knows you are here.

If you are under 13, your account should be created and looked after by a parent, using the parent's own account, rather than set up by you on your own.

Who is actually agreeing to this. If you are under 18, the person who agrees to these terms is your parent or guardian, and they are the person we can hold to them. The law of England and Wales does not generally allow a contract like this to be enforced against a child, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For a sailor under 18, this document is a set of rules: we enforce them by restricting or closing an account under section 14, not by making a claim against a child. A parent who sets up or oversees a child's account agrees to these terms in their own name and is responsible for how that account is used.

We want you to know how this is actually enforced. We ask for a date of birth and, for under-18s, a parent's email address, in the sign-up form. We do not verify either of them, and the checks are in the sign-up page rather than deep in our systems, so they can be bypassed by someone determined to bypass them. We are not able to tell you that we know how old our users are. Two more things about the sign-up form, because they matter to whether anybody has really agreed to this document:

• The sign-up form does not show you these terms, link to them, or ask you to accept them. Nothing in it asks a parent to confirm anything either. Adding an acceptance step — and a separate parental confirmation for an under-18 — is on our list. Until it is there, this section is a rule we are asking you to follow rather than a step the product makes you take.
• We do not send anything to the parent's email address you give us. It sits on the account unverified. It only does any work if that parent later creates their own account and verifies that address, at which point we offer them the link to your account.

What we can tell you is:

• If we do not have a date of birth for an account, we treat that account as belonging to a child, not an adult. Protections fail towards the child.
• If we find out that an account belongs to someone who should not have one, or that a parent's permission was never given, we will contact the parent, restrict the account or delete it.
• Improving this is on our list. Until it is done, this section is a rule you must follow rather than a gate we operate.

A parent acting for a child. A parent linked to their child's account can see what the child sees and can act for them on some things — updating a profile, accepting a connection, entering training data. Where a parent created the account and still runs it, they can also write the child's reflections; from the moment the child sets their own password, reflections are the child's alone and the platform refuses it. A parent can never post or send a message as though they were the child. That refusal applies to every guardian in every situation, and it is not configurable.

Nobody may use SailCoach if we have previously removed their account for breaking these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, unless we agree otherwise in writing.

5. Your account and keeping it secure

Give us accurate information and keep it up to date. Use a password you do not use anywhere else — we require at least ten characters because this platform holds children's data.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Do not share your login. If you think someone else has got into your account, email [email protected] straight away and reset your password using the "forgot password" link on the sign-in page. Completing a reset signs out every other device. There is no change-password control inside the product yet — the reset link is the only route, and building the settings control is on our list.

We may need to contact you about your account, a security issue, a change to these terms, or something that has gone wrong. Those messages are part of the service and you cannot opt out of them while you have an account. Optional messages — product news and the like — you can turn off in your notification settings.

6. What SailCoach costs

SailCoach is free to use today. There is no paid plan, no trial that converts, and no payment system in the product at all. We cannot take a payment from you because there is nothing there to take one with.

We do intend to charge for some things in future. If and when that happens:

• You will never be charged without explicitly choosing a paid plan. Starting to pay will always require a deliberate step by you — clicking through a checkout, entering payment details, agreeing to a price. Silence, continued use, or ignoring an email will never be treated as agreement to pay.
• We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any part of the service you already use starts to carry a charge, and we will say plainly what will change and what happens if you do nothing. If you do nothing, the worst that will happen is that the paid feature stops being available to you — not a bill.
• If you are ever on a paid plan and we change its price, we will tell you at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and you will be able to cancel before it does, without penalty.
• Features that are free today may become paid features in future. If that happens to something you are relying on, the notice above applies, and you can ask us for a copy of your data before you lose access to it. Email [email protected] — there is no download button, and section 15 explains what that means in practice.
• Your statutory rights when you do start paying. Buying a plan from us would be a distance contract, so you would get 14 days to change your mind and get your money back under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. If you asked us to switch a paid feature on straight away, we would tell you at the point of purchase that doing so ends that right early, and we would not switch it on until you had said yes to that. For anything that renews, we would send you a reminder before each renewal and you would be able to cancel it in the same number of steps it took to start. The promises above are in addition to those rights, not instead of them.

Nothing in this section is a promise that SailCoach will always be free. It is a promise about how any change to that will be handled.

7. Your content, and who owns it

You own your content. A sailor's training records, notes, goals, reflections, photos, videos and messages belong to the person who made them. We do not claim ownership of any of it and using SailCoach does not transfer anything to us.

To be able to run the service at all, we need your permission to handle your content. So you give us a licence to host, store, copy, back up, transmit, resize, transcode and display your content for the purpose of providing SailCoach to you and to the people you have shared it with — and for nothing else. The licence is non-exclusive, worldwide (because servers and coaches are), royalty-free, and lasts only as long as we hold the content. It ends when you delete the content or we delete your account.

We do not sell your content. We do not use it to advertise to you. We do not train AI models on it, and we do not give it to anyone else to train theirs. Where we send text to an AI provider to produce a summary for you, that is described in the AI and Automated Analysis Policy and in the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for what you put in. By uploading something you confirm that you have the right to, and that it does not break the law or the Acceptable Use Policy. Photographs and video of children carry an extra rule: you must have the permission the Photography, Video and Image Use Policy requires before you upload an image of a child.

Content other people write about you. A coach's notes, feedback and assessments about a sailor are that coach's work, but they are personal data about the sailor. The sailor — and a parent of a sailor under 18 — has rights over that data whoever wrote it. The Privacy Policy and Your Data Rights explain how to see it, correct it or object to it.

Anything you send us that is not about a sailor — a bug report, a feature suggestion, a comment on how the product should work — we may use freely, without owing you anything for it. We will not identify you as the source without asking.

8. Connections: what a coach, a parent or a club can see

Nothing about a sailor is visible to another user by default. Access comes from four places, and only these four:

• A connection. Two accounts connect by invitation, and either can end it. A connection on its own lets a coach see a sailor's profile and the sessions they share — it does not give them the sailor's medical notes, emergency contact, date of birth, phone number or parent's email address.
• A sharing choice. On top of a connection, a sailor chooses which categories of their data — for example their events and results — a particular coach can see. Turning a category off takes it away again.
• A role at a club or squad. A coach on a squad sees the sailors in it. A club administrator has broader access to members of their own club, including sensitive fields, because somebody has to be able to administer a club. That access does not extend beyond their club. Squad medical notes need stating precisely: a medical note is readable by the squad's head coach and by every coach listed on that squad, on any day, not only by the coach running that sailor's group that morning. The day view narrows what a coach is shown; it is not a wall. Narrowing the underlying access is work we have not done.
• Sharing a club. Two people who are members of the same club can start a direct conversation with each other without a connection. That fallback was built for club-wide and emergency messages and it is wider than it should be: it means an adult at a child's club can message that child directly, with no connection, no parental approval and no notification to anybody. Restricting it to announcements is the first item on our safeguarding register — it is recorded in full at Children's Code, standard 1.

What a parent of a sailor under 18 can see. A linked parent can read what their child can read — profile, sessions, coach notes about them, and the history of their messages. Parents can read; they cannot write as the child. This access ends automatically when the child turns 18. Two qualifications: the adult age is a setting in our systems rather than a constant (it is 18, and we would publish a new version of these terms before changing it); and because a missing date of birth makes us treat an account as a child's, an account with no date of birth recorded never reaches that cut-off. If that is you, email [email protected].

What a coach can keep private from a sailor. There are three different things here and they behave differently.

• A session note is either shared with everyone on the session, or addressed privately to one sailor. A privately-addressed note is hidden from the rest of the session and from other coaches — but it is always readable by the sailor it is about, and by their parent while they are under 18.
• A feedback entry marked coach-only is not shown to the sailor in the app. This is where a coach can think in writing.
• A session write-up carries a switch controlling whether the sailor sees it. It is switched on by default and a coach can switch it off.

Anything in the second or third category is still personal data about the sailor. A sailor, or their parent while they are under 18, can ask us for a copy of it under Your Data Rights, and being told it is "private" is not a reason for us to refuse.

Messages. Direct messages between users are private to the people in the conversation — a parent is not silently added to their child's conversations. Messages are automatically checked against a short list of abusive words. They are not checked for grooming. We have written a scanner that looks for contact details being exchanged, requests to move to another app, and secrecy language; it is not yet connected to the sending of a message, and connecting it is on our safeguarding register with a date — see the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy. We are not going to describe a child-protection control in a contract when we are not running it.

Messages cannot be edited or deleted: once sent, a message stays. Every message sent is written to an audit log with the time, the account, the IP address and the device, and every report is logged too (a report does not yet capture the reporter's IP address, and we are fixing that).

Any user can report a message. Be clear about what that does today: the report is recorded and the message is flagged, but nothing alerts anybody, and there is no screen that shows the queue. For a direct message started in the app it does not reach the club's administrators either, because the conversation is not owned by a club — in practice only we can retrieve it, by querying for it. Reviewing reported content is a trust-and-safety function, not a coaching one: ordinary coaches are not moderators and cannot read other people's messages.

If your concern is about a child's safety, do not use the message-report button and wait. Use the route in the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy. That is an email address a person reads.

9. Race results, and data we did not get from you

Some of what SailCoach knows was never typed into SailCoach. We collect published race results and GPS race tracking from public sources — results websites, club archives and tracking providers — and we link them together so that a sailor can see their own racing history. That corpus contains the names and results of people who have never used SailCoach, including children.

You should know three things about it:

• Results shown to you may be wrong. They are other people's published data, parsed by our software. Sail numbers get reused, names get mis-typed, and our matching of a name to a person is a guess based on published information. Do not treat a record as authoritative because SailCoach displays it. Where results matter, the organising authority's published results are the record, not ours.
• None of it is public on SailCoach, but "signed in" is a low bar. Every page that shows this data requires you to be signed in, and we do not allow search engines to index sailor pages. But any signed-in person can type in a sail number and get back the names attached to it and the races that number has sailed, including a child's. Sail numbers are short and are painted on the hull, so that is a way of finding a child. Restricting the lookup to your own numbers and the sailors you coach, rate-limiting it and logging it are dated commitments in our DPIA. Using it to research children you do not coach is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.
• If a record is about you or your child, you can ask us to correct it, restrict it or remove it from SailCoach. How to do that is in Your Data Rights. The lawful basis we rely on, and the honest limits of it, are set out in the Privacy Policy.

10. Analysis, ratings and AI

SailCoach produces analysis about sailors: performance metrics from GPS tracks, a rating derived from race results, and short written verdicts such as whether a sailor looks ready for a bigger fleet.

Most of this is statistics, not AI — published algorithms and fixed thresholds, with no model learning anything about you. A few features do send text to a third-party AI provider. Which is which, what leaves the platform, and the limits we place on ourselves are all set out in the AI and Automated Analysis Policy.

Two commitments belong here in the contract as well:

• No significant decision about a person is made by software alone on SailCoach. Nothing on this platform selects a squad, awards a level, enters an event or removes anybody from anything automatically. Where levels and squads exist, a human coach sets them.
• Our ratings and verdicts must not be used as the sole basis for selection. If you are a coach or a club, do not use a Helm Grade, a percentile or a "ready for bigger fleets" verdict as the deciding factor in picking a team, promoting a sailor or entering them for an event. The method is published in the AI and Automated Analysis Policy so that a person can argue with the number. In the product itself, a "ready" verdict lists the races it rests on, but the tests behind it are not yet displayed beside it and the full workings are shown only on an adult sailor's page. Both of those are gaps, not design.

Analysis is an opinion produced by software from incomplete data. It is not a fact about a child.

11. The service is in active development

SailCoach is being built. Features appear, change shape, get renamed and sometimes get withdrawn. Parts of it are rough.

We may add, change, limit or remove any feature at any time. Where a change would lose you something you have — data, access to something you relied on, a way of working — we will give you reasonable notice and time to ask us for a copy of your data first. Email [email protected]: there is no download button in the product, so getting a copy means asking a person. Where the change is a bug fix, a security fix or an improvement that costs you nothing, we will just make it.

We will not remove a feature you have paid for without notice and a refund of the unused part. Today this is theoretical, because nothing is paid for.

12. Availability, and the honest position on backups

We do not promise that SailCoach will be available. There is no uptime guarantee, no service level agreement and no compensation for downtime. We run on shared infrastructure, we deploy during the day, and things break.

Backups: we do not currently run automated backups of the main database. Snapshots are taken manually. That means a serious infrastructure failure could lose data that you would not get back. We are not comfortable with this and it is being fixed, but until it is, we are not going to write a durability promise we cannot keep.

What follows from that, practically:

• Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. If a video or a set of notes matters, it should exist somewhere other than SailCoach.
• SailCoach is not a system of record for anything a club or a governing body needs to be able to produce later. Keep your club's own records.
• We will tell you if we lose data that belongs to you, and what we lost.

13. Acceptable use

The rules for how SailCoach may be used are in the Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of these terms. It covers harassment, sharing other people's data, impersonating a coach, images of children, contacting children, security testing and race data. Please read it — it is short, and it is the part of this agreement most likely to affect somebody.

If you are a coach, a club officer or a volunteer, the Code of Conduct applies to you as well.

14. Suspension and termination

We may restrict a feature, suspend an account or close it permanently if you break these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we are required to by law, or if we reasonably believe a child is at risk.

Normally we will tell you first, say what the problem is and give you a chance to put it right, and we will act proportionately — the ladder of responses is set out in the Acceptable Use Policy. We will act immediately and without warning only where there is a real risk to a child, a serious security threat, or a legal requirement to do so.

If we suspend or close your account, we will tell you why, in writing, unless telling you would itself put a child at risk or obstruct a police investigation. You can challenge the decision — the appeal route is in the Acceptable Use Policy and the Complaints Policy.

Where a child is at risk, we may pass information to the child's club, to the RYA, to a local authority or to the police. We will do that whether or not you agree, and the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy explains when.

15. Closing your account

You can close your account at any time, and you do not need a reason.

How to do it today: email [email protected] from the address on the account and ask us to delete it. A parent can ask for their child's account to be deleted the same way.

We are being straight with you about this: there is no self-service delete button in the product yet. Deletion is a manual process that a person carries out. Our commitments are:

• we acknowledge the request within five working days;
• we complete the deletion within 30 days of your request, or of receiving anything we needed in order to identify you;
• we tell you when it is done, and what we have kept and why.

Know what our deletion does today. We do not have a routine that reaches every collection and every stored file. The tool an administrator has removes the account record; it does not cascade. Your notes, messages and the message audit log, sessions, training records, goals, reflections, media files and analytics events have to be found and removed by hand, and we cannot yet promise we have found all of them. We will tell you specifically what we removed and what we could not. Building a deletion that cascades is the largest single piece of work on our register — see the Children's Code Conformance Statement, standard 15, and the Data Retention Schedule.

Some things do not go, for reasons other than that. Records we must keep to run the service safely — security and message audit logs, and records relating to a safeguarding concern — are kept for the periods in the Data Retention Schedule. Data that is genuinely about someone else, such as a coach's own session structure or another sailor's results in a race you both sailed, is not yours to delete. Published race results that we collected from public sources are handled separately, as described in section 9.

We may close inactive accounts, but we will email you first and give you at least 30 days to say you want to keep it.

16. Our responsibility to you, and its limits

What we are responsible for. If we break this contract or fail to use reasonable care and skill, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of that. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if both of us knew it might happen when you started using SailCoach.

That includes your data. If we lose data because we failed to take reasonable care of it, that is our responsibility, and section 12 does not change it. What section 12 asks of you is that you keep your own copy so the loss is smaller — not that you carry it.

What we never exclude. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• any other liability that the law of England and Wales does not allow us to limit or exclude.

If you are a consumer, you have legal rights that these terms cannot take away, and nothing here affects them. If you want to know what they are, Citizens Advice can tell you.

What we are not responsible for.

• Losses that are not foreseeable.
• Losses you suffer because you used SailCoach for something it is not for — including anything in section 2. Deciding it is safe to launch because the platform did not show you a warning is not something we can be responsible for.
• The acts or omissions of other users. We do not employ coaches, we do not arrange coaching, we do not vet anybody, and we are not a party to the arrangement between a sailor and their coach or club. If a coach lets you down, that is between you, the coach and the club.
• The accuracy of race results, GPS tracks or weather data we obtained from third parties.
• Anything caused by an event outside our reasonable control, for as long as it lasts.

If you use SailCoach in the course of a business — as a professional coach charging for coaching, or on behalf of a club or any other organisation — then for that use we exclude liability for loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption and loss of anticipated savings, and our total liability to you for everything arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and £100.

This does not catch volunteers. If you help at a club unpaid — as a volunteer coach, a club officer or a welfare officer — you are not acting in the course of a business, you are still a consumer, and everything above applies to you unchanged. Whether someone is a consumer is a question of fact that the law decides and that we would have to prove; it is not something this contract can declare.

17. Third-party content, links and services

SailCoach shows things that come from elsewhere: map tiles, embedded videos, weather data, race results and GPS tracks from tracking providers. We do not control any of it, we do not endorse it, and we are not responsible for it. Some of these load directly in your browser, which means the provider sees your IP address — the Cookie Policy and the Subprocessors and International Transfers page set out who and what.

If you follow a link out of SailCoach, the other site's terms and privacy policy apply, not ours.

18. Changes to these terms

We will need to change these terms from time to time — because the product changes, because the law changes, or because something here turns out to be wrong.

• Every version of this document stays published, with its effective date, so you can see exactly what changed and when.
• For a material change — anything that reduces your rights, increases your obligations, or introduces a charge — we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and say what is changing in plain words. Where the account belongs to a sailor under 18, we send that email to the linked parent as well, because they are the person agreeing to these terms.
• For a minor change — fixing a typo, clarifying wording, adding a cross-reference — we will publish it and note it in the changelog.
• If you do not agree to a change, you can close your account before it takes effect. Continuing to use SailCoach after a change takes effect means you accept it.

We will not change these terms retrospectively, and we will not treat your silence as agreement to start paying for anything.

19. If something goes wrong

Tell us. Most things are faster to fix than to argue about.

We do not require you to use arbitration, and nothing in these terms stops you going to court or to an ombudsman.

20. Governing law and where disputes are heard

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes can be brought in the courts of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you can also bring proceedings in the courts of the country you live in. If you are a consumer living outside the United Kingdom, you keep the protection of any mandatory consumer law of the country you live in — choosing English law here does not take that away from you.

21. Some smaller points

• The whole agreement. These terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy and the other documents they refer to, are the agreement between us.
• If part of it fails. If a court decides any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest of them still apply.
• Not enforcing something is not giving it up. If we do not act on something immediately, we can still act on it later.
• Transfers. We may transfer this agreement to another organisation — for example if the business is sold — and we will tell you if we do. If the transfer would be worse for you, you can close your account. You may not transfer your account to someone else.
• Other people. Nobody other than you and us has the right to enforce these terms, except that a parent may exercise the rights of their child under 18.

22. How to contact us

• General questions: [email protected]
• These terms, and anything legal: [email protected]

Post is slower than email, and our registered office address is not yet published here — ask at [email protected] if you need to write to us.

These are version 1.0.0 of our terms, effective 17 September 2026.